Endocrine Abstracts

Aim: This study was aimed to estimate the nutritional status and the prevalence of weight excess in a wide unselected population of adolescent and young students from Emilia Romagna.

Material and methods: Three thousand and ninety-one high school students, aged 15–19 years were consecutively contacted. One thousand eight hundred sixty out of 3091 (60.2%) accepted to participate in an epidemiologic study, whose procedures included anthropometric measurements and a nutritional assessment, through a personal interview with a trained dietitian that employed the food-frequency questionnaire and multiple 24-h dietary recall. The percentage of males and females in the study population was 38.6 and 61.4% respectively.

Results: We found a prevalence of overweight or obesity (based on BMI values, standardized for age and sex) of 31.6% in the whole sample, with a higher rate in males than in females (38.7 vs 27.3% respectively). Underweight subjects were 5.9% of the whole sample, and 2.8 and 7.7%, of males and of females, respectively. Mean energy intake was 2409 and 1910 kcal/day for males and females respectively. The analysis of macronutrients showed an unbalanced diet, with excess of percent energy from lipids (35.5±5.2%) and a deficit in percent energy from carbohydrates (49.5±5.6%), when compared to the recommended daily intake (RDA). That was particularly evident for females, whose percent energy from lipids was slightly but significantly higher than in males (35.8 vs 35.1, respectively; P=0.006). Moreover, among lipid and carbohydrate fraction a larger portion than recommended was represented by saturated fats (31.6±5.2%) and oligosaccharides (31.3±8.9%) respectively. As concerns micronutrients, we found a deficit of fibres (significantly more severe in males than in females) and of vitamin D and calcium whose consumption was about a half of the recommended quantity. In conclusion, this study shows that the quality of diet in the young Italian population has reached a critical state. In addition, it shows that the prevalence of overweight or obesity is higher than expected, similarly to published international trends.

Declaration of interest: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of the research project.

Funding: This work was supported, however funding details unavailable.